Spoonful by Howling Wolf has precisely 1 chord in the whole song, and the most prominent riff uses just 2 notes. At its deepest level, blues is about that. But again, please please pleeeease don't try and write blues melodies by just "applying scales", listen to the blues, notice what notes are being used in melodies and solos, and try and learn from that. Especially melodies on the 5 tend to hit some of the sweet spots for the 5. Then, on the V, you might move that 3 all the way down to a 2 (which is the 5 of the V)īlues melodies sometimes "target" the chord more strongly, and sometimes "target" the home key more strongly. You might even hear singers sing a major 3rd on the 1 chord (or just a sliiiightly flat major third), and then flatten it all the way to a minor 3rd on the IV to fill out that IV7. Usually when you play the third in the blues, you flatten it more on the IV than the I. And of course most blues melodies are microtonal, so they use "notes in between the notes", like the blue 3rd and blue 5th.įor a tip though, many blues melodies focus on the flat 3 for both the I and the IV chord because it works as both a blue third on the 1, and a flat 7 for the IV. When writing a blues melody, you can use pretty much any note, expect I guess the flat 2nd/ And even then you could use that as a passing note. That's not how writing music works, least of all writing blues music. Your use of the word "allowed to" is pretty troubling as well. It's just a sort of facsimile invented to help people who don't really know what the blues is to sort of sound like they're playing the blues. "The blues scale" has almost nothing to do with the blues though. Then, use what you've learned to write the blues. What you really need to do is listen to a bunch of blues, and learn how to play the melodies. There are many many different ways to write a blues melody, but none of them involve "applying the blues scale" You are not restricted to using only the blues scale.
Going back to the concept of melody originating from both scales and chords we can create a melody of basic chord tones and their characteristic embellishments. notice the D# instead of Eb and it resolves up to E natural.Īs you can see the palette of tones in the blues isn't limited to a blues scale. But importantly, the occurrences of that tone are only over the dominant chord. But West End Blues has the enharmonic equivalent of that tone, a raised supertonic #^2. Usually the blues scale is described as having a lowered mediant, a b^3. I reviewed my copy of West End Blues and it provides a special case I think is worth mentioning. applied to the primary chords we get these sets of tones. we get the additional chromatic tones ^b3 from IV and ^b7 from I.įurther, let's add these characteristic blues embellishments of the dominant seventh chord. When minor sevenths are added to those chords to make the standard dominant seventh chords of 12 bar blues. regardless of what anyone says about a blues scale the basic primary chords provide all the tones for a diatonic major scale. Consider the three primary harmonies: tonic, dominant, and subdominant I V IV.
I think the blues tonality can be described as an amalgamation of diatonic and characteristic chromaticism. But, this does open up the discussion to say: don't just look at the blues scale as a melodic resource. There is classic question of whether melody originates from scales or chords. I sort the blues scale in my answer above. If you get fixated on a blues scale over chords you could get stuck into a rigid way of thinking. But it does show cross rhythm, repeating riff, clashing notes over the F chord, and a makes a good point about the "blues scale" in his answer. pretty corny, maybe too ragtime for what you want to do. The clashing is fine with the general notion that you eventually get to some "resolution" on the tonic or dominant.Ī sterotypes application of the above might look like.
Often shorts riffs like this are play over all the chord changes without regard for the "clashing" notes. Small segments of the blues scale often get repeated, like in C use C Bb G or Gb F Eb C. Syncopation is also characteristic, playing notes on the up beat. Polyrhythm is very characteristic of blues, that means playing patterns of 3 melodically over a meter of 2 or 4. Surely, the tonic and dominant tones will be natural resting points or central tones for the melody.įocus on rhythm more than a traditional notion of melodic contour. In typical melody writing the melody often uses tones that match the chords along with the careful use of non-chord tones.īut in 12-bar blues the general feeling is: any note of the blues scale can be played over any chord in the progression, so the rule of thumb above doesn't really apply to the blues.
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